Kettle seems to be comparing Rusbridger (above) to the NRA (Photo: Getty)

Martin Kettle, the Guardian's excitable columnist, has written a very odd piece this morning in which he compares Britain's newspaper industry to the National Rifle Association. Below is my fisk of his column.

For 20 torrid years, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, "Who governs?" – parliament or trade unions – was the central issue in domestic politics. In 1969 Harold Wilson's Labour government tried, in Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife white paper, to bring the unions within the law. The unions, and a significant part of the Labour party, fought off the attempt.

See where he's going with this? Trade unions = the press, In Place of Strife = The Leveson Report and the Labour Party = the Conservative Party. Who governs Britain today? Why, the press, of course. Bizarre.

Ted Heath's Tory government tried again in the 1970s, and was driven from office. Jim Callaghan's Labour government ceded the unions a share of power, but he fell because of the unions too. Margaret Thatcher succeeded where Heath had failed, at traumatic cost to the unions – partly self-inflicted – that persists to this day. Yet for the past quarter-century, the "Who governs?" question has had its answer – the right one: parliament governs, through the law.

Kettle gets a bit bogged down here because his torturous historical analogy commits him to praising Margaret Thatcher, who brought the unions to heel. So he tosses in the phrase "traumatic cost" to let his readers know that he disapproved of Thatcher's methods.

The question still matters in Britain today. It matters in a different context, yet the terms are strikingly familiar. Do the elected government and parliament govern? Or are we governed instead by those who also believe, as a matter of fundamental principle and as the unions also once believed, that the law should not apply to them?

Straw man alert! No one's arguing that the press should be above the law. Indeed, one of the main arguments of those opposed to statutory regulation of the press is that nearly all the things Hacked Off and its allies want to prohibit, such as phone hacking, are already prohibited by the law. All we need do to solve the problems that led to the Leveson Inquiry is enforce the law.

The issue is not whether the law in general should apply to the press but whether Parliament should be able to pass laws that are specifically designed to clip the wings of the press. This is what's forbidden by the First Amendment of the American Constitution: "Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…"

Today two groups are the equivalents of the unions of yesteryear. The first are the boardroom tax avoiders, whose corporate and individual taxes, if paid as intended, would transform the public finances from deficit to surplus in an instant.

Hypocrisy claxon! In 2008, the Guardian's parent company CMG made £300 million in profit and paid zero tax, thanks to various avoidance measures. (You can read more on this here and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's rebuttal of the hypocrisy allegation here.)

As for Martin Kettle's claim that clamping down on tax avoidance "would transform the public finances from deficit to surplus in an instant", he's in cloud cuckoo land. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking it would reduce the total tax take rather than increase it. (See Matthew Lynn in Money Week.)

The second group is the British press, with its collective interest in weak government. All these groups have in their time been referred to as barons: trade union barons, boardroom barons and press barons. Barons ultimately believe in their own unrestricted power – though they call it freedom.

Owners of newspapers are sometimes referred to as "barons", barons believe in their own unrestricted power, ergo newspaper owners believe in their own unrestricted power. That's not an argument. It's name-calling.

Unless something improbably statesmanlike happens in the next few weeks, it is increasingly clear that the press has now defeated parliament's two-year attempt to bring it within the rule of law. The Leveson report, published last November amid so much hope for much needed change following the phone-hacking scandal and much else, has failed. Its 2,000 pages are history.

This is where Kettle really goes off the deep end. The alternative Royal Charter proposed by the newspaper industry embodies almost every single one of Leveson's proposals. The only difference is, it wouldn't be underpinned by statute and, therefore, wouldn't be vulnerable to political interference.

Today the Leveson report is to press reform what In Place of Strife was to union reform. (We haven't even got to first base on tax avoidance reform.) Harold Wilson flirted with union reform after the seamen's strike in 1966 and then got scared off in 1969. David Cameron has done the same thing, flirting with press reform after the phone hacking scandals in 2011 before getting scared off in 2013. In both cases vested interest triumphed. In 1969 the Daily Mirror ran a front-page editorial headlined: "There exists in Britain a power outside parliament as great as that which exists within." Today there is again a power outside parliament whose power exceeds parliament's – the press.

The really peculiar thing about this is that Kettle is assuming the alternative Royal Charter, which was submitted to the Privy Council Office yesterday, is going to receive the seal of approval. In fact, it almost certainly won't.

In the six months since Leveson was published, many have presented the report as an attack on the freedom of the press.

Some may believe, genuinely, that this is what is at stake. While accepting the seriousness of the issues, I disagree entirely. I disagree as regards most of the particular effects of Leveson – though some of these are negotiable. But I disagree more fundamentally with the larger assumption, which rests on a false and foolish view both of the nature of the state and the law, and the nature of freedom – a view that no state should make any law regarding the press, even if it is to uphold its freedom.

A "false and foolish view" held by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Index on Censorship, Dan Rather, Ariana Huffington… the list goes on. The reason they hold this view is not because they have a vested interest in toadying up to press barons, but because they believe the press cannot do its job of scrutinising politicians and bringing their wrongdoing to light if it's subject to political control. This principle was neatly encapsulated by Ian Hislop in his Leveson testimony: "If the state regulates the press, then the press no longer regulates the state."

In the course of the post-Leveson debate, a great principle – the free press – has been shamelessly hijacked by vested interests. Freedom has been elided with press self-interest. Press opposition to reform has been brash, heavy-handed and single-minded. Even the extraordinary all-party agreement in March to put significant parts of Leveson under the umbrella of a royal charter caused only momentary hesitation. In the end, not even the fact that no single MP voted against the agreement counted for anything. The press ignored parliament's verdict. It simply resumed its battle to stop it from coming into effect. And now, with its own counter-charter, it has seemingly succeeded.

Has Kettle actually read the Leveson Report? The word "self" in "self-regulation" seems to have completely passed him by. One of Leveson's conclusions was that any system of press regulation, even one underpinned by statute, should be entirely voluntary. The fact that the press has elected to ignore parliament's proposal and go its own way is, therefore, not the same thing as ignoring the Leveson Report. On the contrary, it's entirely consistent with Leveson's proposals, nearly all of which are embodied in the alternative Royal Charter.

All this brings to mind an exchange in Tom Stoppard's Night and Day, quoted by Leveson, in which one character says: "No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable" – to which another character replies: "I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand."

Kettle reads this as a justification for reining in the press when, in fact, it's the opposite. The character who says she can't stand newspapers in the play is Ruth Milne, the wife of a colonial mine owner. A member of the robber baron class, in other words.

But the outcome also has darker echoes of the attitude of America's National Rifle Association, which will never be deflected from defending what it regards as an absolute principle by any evidence or any form of compromise or reform, however modest, needful and widely supported.

The National Rifle Association? Really? Among those expressing reservations about the Parliament-approved Royal Charter are Peter Preston, ex-editor of the Guardian, and Alan Rusbridger, its current editor. Is Kettle saying that they're behaving like members of the NRA?

It is possible that parliament's charter will in fact be created later this month, and that the press's counter-charter will fall by the wayside. But the political dynamic of reform will continue to falter. Parliament's charter will be still-born. It will create a recognition body that much of the press will spurn. The path leads only downhill. The Tory party's heart, torn about the charter option even today, will harden against it by 2014, with a general election imminent. It would be reckless for Labour or the Liberal Democrats to embark on anything tougher on the eve of the campaign. It stretches belief to imagine that even prime minister Miliband would want to pick such a fight with the press in the difficult circumstances of a Labour government. This is a failure for a generation, as Wilson's was in 1969.

I wished I shared Kettle's confidence about the fate of Parliament's Royal Charter. Unfortunately, he's almost certainly wrong about this.

So now our generation has its answer. The press has more power than parliament (as the tax avoiders do). Britain's unbound and politicised press has gambled on politicians' unpopularity and Cameron's weakness – Ukip local election success on Thursday will help the process – and is winning. It thinks that, come the election, Cameron's need for fully armed press allies will trump his need to keep his word on press reform. It is surely right.

Kettle has got this completely back to front. In all likelihood, Cameron's fears of being tainted by association with Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, both of whom will be tried before the next election, will prompt him to support the official Charter.

Can anything be done? Perhaps Sir Brian Leveson himself could re-enter a debate that has spiralled away from what he proposed. That would help. But Leveson is lying low and hoping to become lord chief justice, they say. But if I chaired the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, I would summon Sir Brian, Robert Jay, the McCanns, the Dowlers and Chris Jefferies, in the hope that they could create pressure to stiffen Cameron's resolve.

But this is a mix of "Who governs?" and "Who's chicken?" The answers are alarming. The press governs. And Cameron is chicken. Leveson was the moment. And Cameron flunked it.

It's as if Kettle has woken up in a parallel universe in which the alternative Royal Charter has been approved, Parliament's version has been rejected and the Leveson Report discarded.

The truth is, Hugh Grant, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg will do everything in their power to obstruct the efforts of the newspaper industry to set up an independent regulator that isn't subject to political control and, judging by their success so far, they might well prevail. But if they fail, it won't be because it's the press that governs Britain rather than Parliament. It will be because Parliament isn't prepared to go one step further and pass a law making membership of the official regulatory body compulsory rather than voluntary. That will constitute fully-fledged state licensing of the press for the first time in 317 years and is a step that no one who believes in the principles of liberal democracy should ever take.

• Following my blog post last week, Jack Straw has got in touch and asked me to make clear that he wasn’t the chair of governors at Pimlico School at the time the school went into special measures. In fact, he left the governors in 2000 and the school went into special measures in 2006. Apologies for the error.